I’ve gotten quite a few requests to do another parody song (probably thanks to Lisa for mentioning me in in the Oracle Newbie’s Blog!), so I went ahead and wrote one. This is is The Life of DB Admins, sung to the tune of Hotel California by the Eagles. Enjoy!

—
Late at night at the office, I’m the only one there
Many new tasks to get done, lots of things to repair.
While setting up some table grants, to keep security tight
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I want to stop for the night
There it was on the display;
A piece of query hell
And I was thinking to myself
Let’s give up Oracle and just go Excel
But I made a new index, and I started to pray
For an ending to the query war,
That it would end today…

Welcome to the life of DB Admins
Fix the database
At an urgent pace
Always at work in the life of DB Admins
Any time of year, you will find us here.

Their queries don’t use indexes, and the, where clause never ends (uh)
They got a lot of inefficient joins no DBA recommends.
How they fill up the ORDER BY, disk sorts galore
And then for no reason, they add even more.

So I grow the PGA
Hoping sorts will decline
But then I have to free up some more RAM from my well planned design
And now there’s more full table scans, tons more each day.
With every new line of code that they write
I feel more dismay.

Welcome to the life of DB Admins
Fix the database
At an urgent pace
Living to work in the life of DB Admins
What a nice surprise, loads are on the rise….

CBO is reeling,
Gathered stats once or twice
And I thought, ‘maybe I should just query for some DB_CACHE_ADVICE,’
Or I’ll add a new MView,
Hints are last but not least
I’ll do anything I can do
Until disk reads have all ceased.

Last thing I remember, I was
Looking to explore
A way to get the whole server
Off the rack to smash to the floor
‘Relax,’ said my manager,
Though the code does make you grieve.
You still have a lot of work to do,
Get it done or you’ll never leave!